Exploration

Archive: 28 January 2007

In case you’re one of the people who’s been following the Twitter stuff, and you’re on OS X, then kindly allow me to direct your attention to Twitterific 1.1. Despite its paltry 0.1 increase in version number, it’s acquired some great new features.

The most wonderful addition, in my opinion, is a preference setting that lets you make the window act modal, or not, as you prefer. Having set my copy to “act as normal window”, at least half my problems with Twitterific were abolished. They’ve also changed the auto-hide behavior so that it will auto-hide a short interval after popping up, whereas before it would only auto-hide after a manual refresh (at least, that’s how my copy behaved). This makes it a lot easier to ignore in the background, since it won’t behanging around until you bring it to the foreground. Perhaps this is a side effect of it acting like a normal window. Regardless, it’s welcome. In addition, I like the ability to define a hotkey to bring up the Twitterrific window and the “launch when I login” option.

They’ve also added a post character counter, so you know how close you are to hitting the tweet cap. That’s nice to see, though as I understand it, the number of characters permitted for a post is dependent on the number of characters in your username. Twitterific just gives you a flat 141 characters—which, given the basic nature of Twitter, seems like it really ought to be more than enough.

Now, if it just let me define my own background-foreground colors and made it easier to replace the alert sound, I’d regard it as being pretty much perfect. (Yes, I can dig into the package contents and replace the alert sound, but I’d rather there was a preference setting so that I don’t have to futz around inside the package every time I update the software.)

Oh, and if you’re a Twitterific user, you absolutely want to add Twitterific as a friend, since they use that channel to tweet release announcements and tips on using Twitterific. If I’d had them added to my Twitter account, I wouldn’t have had to post about my frustration over trying to change usernames—they’d tweeted the answer the day before I posted here—and could have thus been spared the shame of broadcasting to the world my ignorance of the proper spelling of “terrific”. Though I suppose in that case, I’d still be ignorant, so maybe it’s better I posted after all.

Well, either way, if you’re using Twitterific 1.0 or an OS X user interested in using Twitter, check out the new version.